The OnlyAEO Blog
Actionable insights on Answer Engine Optimization, AI visibility, and getting your brand cited by the AI platforms your buyers use every day.
- AEO Strategy
How to Win AI Citations When Your Category Does Not Have a Name Yet
When your product invents a category AI has never learned, standard AEO advice breaks because there is no query to rank for. Here is how to name the category, seed the entity associations engines use to file you, and earn citations for the problem before the category has a search
- AEO Strategy
What AI Engines Do With Your Changelog and Release Notes
AI engines treat your changelog as dated, checkable evidence of what your product does right now, and lift facts from it that override stale training memory. Here is how ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini read release notes, why they get quoted, and how to structure them so engines
- AEO Strategy
Google AI Mode Is a Different Beast: What Actually Wins Brand Mentions in Google's Chat Search
Google AI Mode selects sources differently than blue-link search, AI Overviews, and ChatGPT. Here is how query fan-out and passage-level scoring pick brands, why AI Mode and AI Overviews agree on the answer but cite the same URLs only 13.7% of the time, and the playbook to get yo
- AEO Strategy
How to Measure the Conversion Rate of AI-Referred Traffic
AI-referred visitors convert well above organic, but most analytics undercount both the traffic and the conversions. Here is how to measure the true conversion rate of traffic from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude, including the hidden sessions that hide in Direct.
- AEO Strategy
The AEO Discovery Call: Questions an Agency Asks Before Quoting AI Visibility Work
The discovery call is where AEO engagements are scoped or scuttled. Here are the questions an agency asks a prospect before quoting AI visibility work: what to diagnose live, the answers that change the price, and the red flags that mean you walk.
- AEO Strategy
AEO for a Two-Sided Marketplace: Getting Cited on Both Sides of the Network
A marketplace has two audiences who ask AI opposite questions. Here is how to win AI citations on both the supply and demand sides: two prompt sets, two content tracks, per-side measurement, and the entity problem that makes one side invisible.
- AEO Strategy
How to Attribute a Free Trial Signup to an AI Assistant Recommendation
AI assistants send buyers who sign up for your trial, then hide in Direct traffic. Here is how to attribute a free trial signup to a ChatGPT or Perplexity recommendation using self-report, cohort corroboration, and branded-search lift.
- AEO Strategy
How to Benchmark Your AI Citation Share Against a Single Named Competitor
Aggregate share-of-voice hides the fight that matters. Here is how to benchmark your AI citation share head-to-head against one named competitor: build the prompt set, score three levels, compute a fair two-brand share per engine, and read the gap.
- AEO Strategy
How a CFO Should Evaluate an AEO Investment Request
A finance-side diligence framework for an answer engine optimization budget ask: the questions to put to marketing, why standard payback math breaks on a channel with no referrer, how to stage the funding, and the guarantees to reject.
- AEO Strategy
How Sales Teams Should Handle a Buyer Who Arrives Quoting an AI Answer
Buyers now open sales calls quoting ChatGPT, and some of what they quote is wrong about you. Here is the rep playbook: diagnose what the engine told them, correct wrong facts without sounding defensive, and feed the pattern back to fix it at the source.
- AEO Strategy
The AEO Content Brief: What to Hand a Writer So AI Cites the Draft
A fill-in-the-blank AEO content brief that encodes citation structure without turning writers into typists. The nine fields, a worked example, and the QA gate that catches a draft AI will ignore before you publish it.
- AEO Strategy
How to Handle a Client Who Demands AEO Guarantees You Cannot Make
A client wants a guaranteed AI citation or a fixed date, and you cannot honestly promise either. Here is the script that redirects the demand to what you can guarantee, the contract language that holds, and how to keep the deal without lying to win it.